abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality. — Piet Mondrian
Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form. — Anton Ehrenzweig
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. — Jackson Pollock
The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements. — Jan Tschichold
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. — Pablo Picasso
Art revolves around creating something that isn't there. — Kathleen Hanna
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was. — Jackson Pollock
Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space. — Joan Mitchell
Malevitch discovered abstraction as an experimental principle that can propel creative work to previously unheard levels of invention; this abstract work allowed much greater levels of creativity. — Zaha Hadid
The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty. — Piet Mondrian
I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. — Mark Rothko
Art must be unaesthetic in the extreme, useless and impossible to justify. — Francis Picabia
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. — Paul Klee
Art is the colors and textures of your imagination. — Meghan Trainor
Through art we express our conception of what nature is not. — Pablo Picasso
Short Abstract Art Quotes
Great art picks up where nature ends. — Marc Chagall
Art is subject to arbitrary fashion. — Kary Mullis
Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary. — Carl Andre
There is no must in art because art is free. — Wassily Kandinsky
It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap. — Marcel Duchamp
Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir
The purpose of art is mystery. — Rene Magritte
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. — G. K. Chesterton
Abstract Art Image Quotes
You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget about you.
Modern Abstract Art Quotes
The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating. — Jackson Pollock
The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all. — Andy Warhol
I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art. — Peggy Guggenheim
The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.
I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. — Jackson Pollock
The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces. — Jackson Pollock
Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. — Jackson Pollock
The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order. — Robert Motherwell
The movement of abstract art... bears within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and psychological conditions surrounding modern culture. — Meyer Schapiro
The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing. — Richard Leakey
Kandinsky Quotes
To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other...Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation. — Michel De Certeau
Somebody can paint with a fine brush like Monet and do millions of little dots or somebody can splatter it up there like Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock and go "Yep, that's art." That's okay. — Patrick Wilson
I had to find a way to paint abstractly, which is what I wanted to do. I couldn't forget Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, I mean that was the basis. — Frank Stella
There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends. — Josef Albers
I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time. — Josef Albers
Kandinsky in Munich uttered the well known words: 'Everything is permitted!' In 1961; we still live by this heritage, which in truth is inexhaustible. — Michel Seuphor
The Berlin of the '20s formed the foundation of my future education... the Berlin of the UFA studios, of Fritz Lang, Lubitsch and Erich Pommer. The Berlin of the architects Gropius, Mendelsohn and Mies van der Rohe. The Berlin of the painters Max Libermann, Grosz, Otto Dix, Klee and Kandinsky. — Ken Adam
All day long I add up columns of figures and make everything balanced. I come home. I sit down. I look at a Kandinsky and it's wonderful. — Solomon R. Guggenheim
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. — Mark Twain
It's better to have died a small child than to be a politician who gets caught in a scandal during a slow news month. — Lewis Grizzard
Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way. — Martin Luther King
Give me the patience for the small things of life, courage for the great trials of life. Help me to do my best each day and then go to sleep knowing God is awake. — Voltaire
Illnesses do not come upon us out of the blue. They are developed from small daily sins against Nature. When enough sins have accumulated, illnesses will suddenly appear. — Hippocrates
I don't do great things. I do small things with great love. — Mother Teresa
It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action. — Fidel Castro
Cool Quotes
Play it cool, that's the old school rule man. — Nas
Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. — Dr. Seuss
You don't have to be angry, you don't have to be too cool for school. You can just have a good time and dance like no one's watching. Just enjoy life. — Brendon Urie
Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. — Walt Whitman
The coolest thing is when you don’t care about being cool anymore. Indifference is the greatest aphrodisiac - that’s what really sums up style for me. — Rick Owens
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it ... what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your own unconscious therapy. Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air, and you. — Langston Hughes
When the weather is hot, keep a cool mind. When the weather is cold, keep a warm heart. — Ajahn Brahm
My ex-girlfriend owned a parakeet…oh my god, that f**king thing would never shut up. But the bird was cool. — Anthony Jeselnik
The first river you paddle runs through the rest of your life. It bubbles up in pools and eddies to remind you who you are. — Lynn Culbreath Noel
Nice Quotes
It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership. — Nelson Mandela
You can do nice things for people all of the time and it's never noticed but as soon as you make one mistake it's never forgotten. — Tyga
I live right in front of my daughter. I have a little house right in front of her because I can stay in touch. It's like a little commune, and it's very nice, because you can be close. I can see my granddaughter. I live very close to my brother, too, and my son. We're a very close family. — Debbie Reynolds
There is nothing wrong with having a good job, there is nothing wrong with having a nice house, there is nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong when that is your goal. — Nouman Ali Khan
When a woman didn't enjoy it, she leaves early in the morning. Those who had a nice time will wait until the sun comes out, requests breakfast and taxi money. — Julius Malema
Now here's a funky introduction of how nice I am
Tell your mother, tell your father, send a telegram. — Phife Dawg
Be nice to people on your way up because you'll meet them on your way down. — Wilson Mizner
Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight. — Johnny Cash
I don't care if you're black, white, straight, bisexual, gay, lesbian, short, tall, fat, skinny, rich or poor. If you're nice to me, I'll be nice to you. Simple as that. — Eminem
Don't just show kindness in passing or to be courteous. Show it in depth, show it with passion, and expect nothing in return. Kindness is not just about being nice; it's about recognizing another human being who deserves care and respect. — Colin Powell
Abstract Painting Quotes
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. — Jackson Pollock
Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. — Wassily Kandinsky
I want people to know what it is they're looking at. But at the same time, the closer they get to the painting, it's like going back into childhood. And it's like an abstract piece.. it becomes the landscape of the brush marks rather than just sort of an intellectual landscape. — Jenny Saville
I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time. — Henry Flynt
Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion. — Alexander Calder
I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall. — Frank Stella
We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface. — Theo van Doesburg
I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea. — Willem de Kooning
The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on! — LeRoy Neiman
I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman. — Jean-Michel Basquiat
Abstract Expressionism Quotes
I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism. — Don Delillo
Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning). — Jerry Saltz
But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. — Romare Bearden
There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of Abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction. — Robert Rauschenberg
When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own. — Jackson Pollock
I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. — Jackson Pollock
Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty. — Robert Motherwell
Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks. — Joni Mitchell
The abstract has no emotional content... the abstract is more powerful the more abstract it is. — Cecil Balmond
Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties. — Nora Ephron
Neckties satisfy modern man's desire to dress in art. — Harry Anderson
We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams. — Albert Einstein
It was not very easy for a woman to impose herself as a modern artist in Germany… Most of our male colleagues continued for a long time to look upon us as charming and gifted amateurs, denying us implicitly any real professional status. — Hannah Hoch
I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 - the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind was born. — Eric Kandel
Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet. — Ada Louise Huxtable
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. — Tom Stoppard
Avant Garde Art Quotes
If I paint like a barbarian, it's because we live in a barbarous age — Karel Appel
The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end. — Clement Greenberg
I've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done. — Jeff Koons
You might argue that the history of contemporary art is a series of avant-garde movements, each new wave outraging the last. — Michael Scott
Dance in this century has remained primarily a personal ritual operating, like most avant-garde art, as an idiosyncratic form rather than a tribal expression of religious powers or a corporate expression of societal values. — Jamake Highwater
I didn't set out to do something different so much as do something that interested me. I wasn't trying to be avant-garde - that's being fashionable. You don't set out to revolutionize art, you make statements for yourself. — Arnold Newman
I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level. — Steven Soderbergh
In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her. — Yayoi Kusama
Experiment - exercising to see the result. We planned Europa not as an experiment in this sense but as a work of art. Yet The Eye and the Ear was done as a consciously designed experiment. Not every avant-garde dealt with experiments and not every experiment equalled avant-garde. — Stefan Themerson
Contemporary Art Quotes
If Graffiti is art and art is a crime then how come piccaso never done time? — Melvin Glover
My work seen in its totality is a statement about the integration of the contemporary artist into an industrial society. — Herbert Bayer
The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls. — Maya Deren
Graffiti writers will never stop. They'll just evolve. It's interesting what ideas people come up with and how it all extends forward. — Ben Eine
For me it's very important to turn Kiev into one of the main centers of contemporary art in the world. There is New York. There's London. And there will be Kiev. Everyone will come and say, 'Wow! — Victor Pinchuk
A wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with. — Banksy
I especially like to collect contemporary art. — Yusaku Maezawa
I began collecting artwork as a way to help young artists to promote their work as well as to increase awareness of contemporary art among the younger generation. — Yusaku Maezawa
I didn't want to make 'high' art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity. — Cindy Sherman
New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas. — Sol LeWitt
The drawings don't start with 'a beautiful mark'. It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn't have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion. — William Kentridge
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. — Oliver Sacks
The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. — Kenneth Tynan
I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either. — Antoni Tapies
Black and white is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive...
Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. — Roger Ballen
Art - when it is really doing what it should do - teaches abstract thinking; it teaches teamwork; it teaches people to actually think about things that they cannot see. — Bill T. Jones
In the abstract art of cooking, ingredients trump appliances, passion supersedes expertise, creativity triumphs over technique, spontaneity inspires invention, and wine makes even the worst culinary disaster taste delicious. — Bob Blumer
Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not....All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract. — Yves Klein
It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression. — Agnes Martin
Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas. — Arshile Gorky
In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something. — Andreas Gursky
Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit. — Alex Grey
Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all. — Donald Judd
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. — Havelock Ellis
My advice to those who which to learn the art of scientific prophesy is not to rely on abstract reason, but to decipher the secret language of Nature from Nature's documents: the facts of experience. — Max Born
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. — Salvador Dali
You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye. — Clement Greenberg
In a successful painting everything is integral - all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness. — Richard Diebenkorn
We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end. — Camille Paglia
Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world. — Wassily Kandinsky
It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction. — Igor Stravinsky
Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression. — Etel Adnan
I've heard many times that with all good artists it's ultimately a self-portrait even if it's an abstraction. I feel my work is very much who I am. I didn't try to make it that way; it just is. It reflects who I am and also my interests. — Joyce Tenneson
The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not. — Ad Reinhardt
All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color. — Piet Mondrian
Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes. — Arshile Gorky
In Conclusion
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